Connected Cup

The story

Brussels is where policy is written every day for more than 450 million people who call Europe home. Europe’s future is shaped here, and more often than not the conversation starts over a cup of coffee.

We built Connected Cup with Google to fuel those conversations: a temporary coffee and events space in the EU Quarter, open to the public from 8:00 to 16:00 every weekday for four weeks ahead of AI Innovation Month. It put cutting-edge AI tools from Google and its partners into the room — but human connection, fuelled by excellent coffee, was the point.

Over its four weeks it carried more than thirty events. Hands-on demos let people try the tools rather than watch a slide about them. Workshops ran from short practical sessions to longer deep dives. Talks and fireside conversations brought in the European inventors, thinkers and builders shaping the technology. And evening socials put tech enthusiasts, policymakers and future AI talent in the same room, which is the part that is hard to schedule and easy to underestimate.

The room changed shape for all of it — rows of chairs for a session, round tables for a workshop, the floor cleared for a reception — and went back to trading as a café the next morning.

Come for the technology; stay for the coffee.